And Europeans are none too happy about it:
In Germany, a government investigation into what Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government knew about Prism will likely come into being this week. In Brussels, kickoff talks on the EU-U.S. trade deal could be hampered or stall out completely over fears that the U.S. government is using its spying system to steal European trade secrets. And on both sides of the Atlantic, Transatlanticists are struggling to figure out what still binds both sides.
Stephen Walt says the spying should come as no surprise to political realists:
What we are is a set of national states whose interests align in many areas, but not everywhere. And that’s also why various proposals for a global “League of Democracies” were always a bit silly: Sharing a democratic system is too weak a reed on which to rest a global alliance. Even democratic states experience conflicts of interest with each other, and as the NSA has now shown, they continue to see each other as competitors and spy on each other in order to seize various advantages. So nobody should be surprised that the United States was using its superior technical capacity to try to gain an edge on its European partners, and you can be sure that America’s European allies have been spying on the United States too, if not as extensively or as expensively.
(Photo by Mike Herbst)
The Dish 